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From: Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com>
On Mon, 10 Sep 2012, Paul Anderson wrote:
Pseudo derives from the Greek ??????, (pseudes) which
means
"lying". So it means exactly fake:) Aristophanes in one of his plays
even has a Persian ambassador character named Pseudartabas - "false
measure".
But, by meaning fake, it could mean "completely not the same", or so good
a fake that it's hard to tell the difference from the real thing.
A "pseudo IBM XT" would mean a fake XT, like those perfectly infringing
Chinese imitations. (sometimes called a "clone")
C: Pseudo, at least in my head, can seem to indicate takes on some characteristics of
what's it's copying. But falls short. Hence the usage of pseudo-compatible. Off
the top of my pointy head, all "ms-dos compatibles", which is in itself a
misleading term (chances are every term will end up being misleading) could read IBM
formatted disks. Probably all used extended ASCII. So there are different levels of
compatibility. All used BASIC probably. Not all were BIOS compatible, but by necessity all
were dos services compatible.
As you point out the usage of pseudo is at best ambiguous, if not altogether misleading.
Oi whatever. Maybe pseudo should be abolished in favor of in-